By Ian Boudreau 30 May 2019

In 2017 Adobe announced the End Of Life for the Flash browser plugin was coming at the end of 2020.  Flash developers still had the ability to deploy their applications to desktops and mobile devices using Adobe AIR technology.  Today, Adobe announced the EOL for that platform as well.

As of June 2019, Adobe is transitioning ongoing platform support and feature development of AIR to HARMAN. This will coincide with an Adobe-issued update of AIR, v32, for supported mobile and desktop platforms. HARMAN has a long-standing history as an Adobe AIR partner, maintains knowledge of the platform and ecosystem, and is well-positioned to support AIR developers moving forward.

HARMAN (a wholly‐owned subsidiary of Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.) designs and engineers connected products and solutions for automakers, consumers, and enterprises worldwide. HARMAN’s software services power billions of mobile devices and systems that are connected, integrated and secure across all platforms, from work and home to car and mobile. Adobe has a long history collaborating with HARMAN, which is a key partner for Flash runtime migration and enterprise support as companies transition their existing ActionScript and Flex applications to new technologies. HARMAN has also been supporting customers with bespoke versions of Adobe AIR for the past decade.

Adobe will provide basic security support – limited to security fixes only for desktop platforms (Windows 7 and above, and Mac OS X) – for Adobe AIR v32 until the end of 2020. After that time, Adobe support for AIR will be discontinued and ongoing support will be managed by HARMAN and communicated by them directly. However, beginning with the release of AIR v33 by HARMAN, developers should contact HARMAN directly for AIR support on both mobile and desktop platforms – including bug fixes, platform compatibility, and new and improved functionality.

This means HARMAN will now control the future of the AIR platform and I would certainly expect Adobe tools to complete the transition away from supporting Flash, removing a great deal of the developer appeal in the first place.  You can learn more about HARMAN’s future plans for the Flash/AIR platform here.

GameDev News Applications

Well this is an odd one. Verlet Swing is coming to Switch in two weeks and appears to be a first-person fusion of Spider-Man and Salvador Dali. Sure, why not?

Coming from Flamebait Games, it’s described as ‘an eccentric world where weird stuff happens’. It appears that you use a grappling hook to swing around surrealist environments filled with statues, marine life and floating foodstuffs. You swing around 100 levels carefully navigating the bizarre gauntlet – colliding with any piece of the dreamscape means instant death.

The game’s been available on PC for a while, but beyond these surreal pics and the trailer above from last year, there’s not a lot to go on. Intriguing!

On Nintendo’s website the key features are as follows:

– 100 levels of fast-paced swinging action
– Increasingly surreal levels to swing through
– Progressively difficult gameplay. Only the best of swingers will reach the final levels!
– Test your swinging skills with leaderboards and Challenges mode

We’re still trying to to work out if this one is trying too hard, or not trying hard enough. That said, the Steam version has got a Very Positive rating at the time of writing, so it might be worth investigating this oddity when it launches in two weeks’ time. It’ll cost you $14.99 to dive into this dream / nightmare of flying fish, pizza and Polybius, and perhaps it’ll satisfy the Spider-Man fantasies we’ve been having since the PS4 game came out.

Does this interest you or does it look like someone went to a Dali exhibition and got a bit carried away with themselves? Share your thoughts below.

You’ve dominated as the Piranha Plant in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, now take to the court as Fire Piranha Plant in Mario Tennis Aces. Yes, that’s right – the pesky Mario enemy that shoots fireballs in multiple directions will join Camelot’s tennis game next month.

As you can see in the video above, Fire Piranha Plant is a complete natural on the court, holding a racquet in its mouth and returning shots with relative ease. Its special shot is also the perfect way to finish an opponent. Interestingly, this is the second playable Piranha Plant to be added to the game, right behind Petey Piranha.

If you want to play as Fire Piranha Plant, all you have to do is participate in next month’s tournament. Otherwise you’ll have to wait until July to unlock the character.

Are you looking forward to trying out Fire Piranha Plant in Mario Tennis Aces? Tell us below.

There’s been a resurgence of FMV games in recent years that has done much to change the genre’s reputation after being tarnished in the ’90s by some rotten examples on early CD-based systems. Publisher Wales Interactive has been championing the genre for a while now and next year it’ll be overseeing the release of a new entry in the genre.

The Complex is described as a ‘cinematic FMV sci-fi thriller’ and it’s coming to all consoles including Switch in Q1 2020. The story revolves around two scientists that find themselves trapped in an underground laboratory following an incident involving a bio-weapon in London. It’ll be down to you to escape from the lab by forging relationships and making hard interactive choices – over 100 of them, apparently – that lead to different endings.

Described as a ‘female-driven production’, it has been written by Lynn Renee Maxcy, part of the writing team on award-winning adaptation of Margret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. With acting talent from series including Bad Blood, Game of Thrones and Grantchester, there certainly seems to be a little more pedigree in this production than you might expect if ‘FMV’ is synonymous with Night Trap in your mind.

We’ve played several of Wales Interactive’s offerings such as The Bunker and Late Shift, with the latter standing out as a particularly effective example, so we’re hoping The Complex can give FMV fans another solid game to point sceptics to when it releases early next year.

Are you a fan of FMV? Does the genre get a bad rap or is its reputation well-deserved? Let us know below.

Any game inspired by Castlevania and Mega Man X is likely worth a look, and so it is with Timespinner, an ‘ode to classic ’90s action platformers’ which launched last year on other platforms. Happily, it’s now been confirmed to arrive on Switch next week (4th June, to be precise).

We first reported on it way back in 2014 when a 3DS version formed part of its successful Kickstarter campaign. Unfortunately that version has bitten the dust, as detailed in a Kickstarter update, with the developer acknowledging that 3DS version was too ambitious to undertake. That’s disappointing, of course, but backers of the 3DS version are able to get a copy of the game on an alternative platform of their choosing, including the Switch version, so there shouldn’t be too much cause for complaint.

The game itself was well-received when it launched last September and the above trailer shows some enticing Metroidvania gameplay for fans to tuck into. As you might have guessed from the title, it involves some time travelling shenanigans which you use to fox foes and solve puzzles.

Here are just a handful of highlights the official blurb discusses:

– Discover a lovingly-crafted, beautiful pixel art world and uncover a rich story universe
– Explore both the past and present of Lachiem, from grand medieval castles, to sparkling serene lakes, a bustling metropolis and even a space-age laboratory
– Clobber enemies with Magic Orbs which grow in power the more you use them
– Befriend mysterious Familiars and train them to aid you in battle
– Locate hidden areas and treasures through secret walls and platforming puzzles
– Invite a second player to join the adventure by controlling Lunais’ Familiar in local co-op mode

That local co-op sounds interesting, and everything we’ve seen and heard makes this one to look out for when it launches on Switch next week. It launches on 4th June $19.99.

Were you a backer of the Kickstarter? Have you played this on other platforms? Let us know your thoughts with a comment in the section below for those sorts of things.

Unity’s Japanese office has announced that the engine now supports projects developed with Nintendo’s Switch-powered Labo VR goggles in mind.

In a press release picked up by Famitsu (and translated via Google Translate), Unity Technologies Japan said that the support enables devs registered with Nintendo’s developer portal to create Switch games that make use of Nintendo Labo’s cardboard-based VR goggles.

Nintendo’s Labo VR kits use cardboard and a set of lenses to let Switch owners modify their console into a makeshift VR headset. Soon after, the company announced that it would be adding VR modes into its existing games like Super Mario Odyssey and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Now building on its existing partnership with Unity, Nintendo has brought the ability to create similar experiences to external development teams.

Devs interested in working with Labo VR can find more information on Nintendo’s Developer Portal, though it is worth noting that no announcement about any support for Labo VR has been made by Unity’s US-based offices.

[Spoiler Alert]

It seems there are no second acts in Norwegian life either.

Red Thread Games’ anticipated Draugen transports the player to 1923, in the fictional village of Graavik, tucked into a Norwegian fjord, for an adventure to discover “what lies beneath.” Playing as the nebbish (if handsomely voiced) American scholar Edward Harden, you and your “gregarious and enigmatic young ward” Lissie explore the strangely deserted town in search of Edward’s wayward sister Betty, an intrepid and stylish journalist.

Graavik quickly reveals a litany of tragedies stretching back to the turn of the century, and a slow death that began long before Lissie and Edward set foot upon its shores.

At its best, this is a story that mints beautiful phrases in a heroically gorgeous setting. It is even moving at points, evoking themes of futility, isolation, and loss with stunning flashes of clarity. But in the end Draugen shyly reaches for something well beyond its grasp and its portrayal of mental illness leaves so much to be desired, especially when it is ultimately the fulcrum upon which the whole story is so precariously balanced.

[Spoilers for Draugen follow; you’ve been warned, please don’t hurt me, I have a family.]

***

The debt this game owes to Dear Esther is staggering: each features an eloquently sad man wandering in the beautiful desolation of northern solitude in search of a woman–and closure, as it turns out.

I’m on the cusp of spoiling the game but to be quite frank, the game’s biggest spoilers are blazingly obvious in the first few minutes of play. Careful attention to what is said and how will make certain truths abundantly plain by the end of the game’s first day. That’s hardly a sin, of course, but the nature of the spoiler might be.

After all, the great spoiler is Edward himself. About halfway through the game, it’s revealed that he has an unnamed mental illness that seems to be some blurry combination of schizophrenia and dissociative identity disorder. As is often the case with ham-handed portrayals that attempt to turn such things into “art,” the lines are vague and inexact. Lissie exists only in Edward’s mind, along with another character–The Entity, a thunderously voiced statue of a feminine angel.

What feels particularly noxious here is the reduction of a lived experience, an identity, to a “twist.” It’s on a par with the way trans identity is rendered such in films like The Crying Game, the semiotics of which always pervert a person into a stunning surprise you’re not meant to tell your friends about. It would have been considerably more powerful and interesting if the game had been honest from the start so that we could be a part of Edward and Lissie’s journey in full consciousness of who they really were.

That brings me to the second twist, which attentive readers might have already guessed: Betty isn’t real either. At least, not strictly. She died as a child; Edward’s simply been unable to let go, inventing a whole adult life for her that saw him chase her across the globe. I won’t lie, there is a big part of me that deeply regretted the fact that Betty, the cosmopolitan flapper Lois Lane, wasn’t even diegetically real. But that’s only the start of the thematic issues here: every woman of significance to the story is bent towards either motivating or healing Edward. Betty is a strangely fridged figure, a dead girl alchemized into something that can’t exist just to give the entire game (defined by Edward’s journey) a reason for existing. Meanwhile, Lissie is brilliant: a spinner of many witty lines in delectable ’20s slang whose personality is at turns willful and compassionate. But she is ultimately a helpmate for Edward–and, by her very nature, forever shackled to him.

It all adds up to a story that is less than the sum of its parts, tragically falling short despite having such incredible ingredients. After all, despite everything I’ve said here, I like Lissie and Edward as characters–their voice actors, Nicholas Boulton and Skye Bennett, bring them to life with effortless panache; Ragnar Tørnquist weaved some enchanting dialogue for them–while Graavik itself emerges as a character in its own right. There are beautiful ghosts here, dancing across the mountains limning that fjord. But the story’s the thing, and it does an injustice to both its characters and setting.

***

Dear Esther showed how much was left after it took everything away; Draugen shocks by showing how little is left when you put it all back.

Draugen is considerably more interactive than Esther, with dialogue choices and interactive objects aplenty, as well as ways of engaging with the world that are surprisingly meditative and soothing. There are places Edward can sit to draw in his journal. Although you can run, the game encourages an unhurried pace that rewards attention to its beautiful details. There are pianos to play, bells to ring, cave-ins to outrun, arguments to have, and mental states to breakdown. Yet somehow, so much of it came to feel inadequate.

A game mechanic always suggests something beyond itself. Its very existence points to some distant horizon. If you can pick up an object in a game, it suggests the possibility of picking up other objects, or manipulating them in other ways, and it can be frustrating when that proves impossible. One has to skillfully steer the player’s attention away from what they can’t do, while letting them fully enjoy what they can.

In Draugen you’re meant to take it slow and explore the village. But you’re stymied by doors you can’t interact with, invisible walls in fields and along roads, and more. It’s hard to stop and smell the roses when you’re blocked from even reaching them. The dialogue system has its perks, but it also doesn’t go much further than what one might get in a BioWare game–save for the fact that many options come with clear explanations of what Edward is thinking in relation to each term/concept, which is profoundly more helpful than three word descriptions on a dialogue wheel. The weather changed with Edward’s mood, but so subtly that it wouldn’t have occurred to me to link the two had I not been prompted by the game’s promo material.

And yet there are, as I said, flashes of something more. During particularly heated discussions, Lissie will chide you if you look away from her while she’s talking. It’s a stunning little detail that does so much to involve you in the moment, that implicates you in the scene by refusing the easy logic of video games (‘I can point my head/camera wherever I want and it won’t mean anything’). That bit of feedback makes you accountable to an in-game character–as if she were real. That was a breath of fresh air.

***

But we must return to the issue of mental illness. Is this the worst portrayal of it that I’ve seen in a video game? No, but that’s hardly saying much. By setting up Edward and Lissie to be a ‘fake out,’ instead of pitching them to us as a man and an alter, or a man and his imaginary friend, it actually undermines the good that does emerge later in the game.

Contrary to most of the more grotesque portrayals of mental illnesses that involve “hearing voices” or “seeing things,” Lissie and The Entity are not malevolent forces. Edward does not triumph by banishing them, but rather by recognizing both their contingent reality and respecting them as autonomous beings. The former, especially, matches up with how most people like Edward actually live. They know their companions do not exist physically, and instead build life around their insistent existence.

The symmetry with dissociative identity disorder is even more interesting if one reads Lissie and The Entity as alternate identities for Edward that he’s used to process trauma (of which he’s had plenty). Even so, The Entity shades into cliche territory–she berates Edward for pushing everyone else away, intoning that only she and Lissie truly love him. It’s a tired trope of possessiveness that could’ve been quoted from a dozen movies. Lissie, at least, feels more human, the way an actual DID alter might: a person with independent hopes and dreams who can treat her host with profound love. She even emerges as the moral center to the story, trying to focus Edward on the death and desolation around him, enjoining him to solve the mystery so that the people of Graavik can have their stories told. For all her insouciance, she genuinely cares. That is, at least, something relatively compassionate in Draugen’s portrayal of mental illness.

But had the game front loaded with this understanding and let the drama emerge from something in Graavik–rather than using this tragic graveyard of a town as a stage for Edward’s quest for closure–the overall portrayal would have been far stronger. As it is, to service this “surprise! Edward’s craaaaazy!” twist trope, Graavik’s very real tragedies recede into the background, failing even to resolve into coherence by the game’s end.

I realized then, as the epilogue unfolded, that this was a game that actually shied away from its weirdness. Its theater of the mind was halfhearted, reduced only to jump scares of faces appearing in lightning-struck windows. What lay beneath in Edward, in Graavik, wasn’t truly explored. It was as if the game was somewhat ashamed of the territory it staked out, going only so far and then no further; in the process what was left behind was a story that veered dangerously close to ableist cliches. In the end you’re left to speculate about what really happened in Graavik, no clear answers forthcoming; that could have been an artful elision, but as it was it felt like yet another glaring lack in the game. Another missed opportunity.

The end credits thereafter promise, a la James Bond, that “Edward and Lissie Will Return” and–oddly–I was relieved to see that. There’s hope yet for these incredible characters. Hope that they’ll star in a game worthy of them and who they really are–one that won’t turn them into a tortured metaphor or postmodern carnival attraction.

Katherine Cross is a Ph.D student in sociology who researches anti-social behavior online, and a gaming critic whose work has appeared in numerous publications.